Terry Prone: Nine golden rules to follow when you are in Robert Troy’s position
Those of you with political ambitions, listen up. Let’s say you’re looking at the possibility of becoming a politician, with a view to eventually becoming a full minister or a minister of State. Or even revolving Taoiseach or Tánaiste. You come to me asking about communications and branding.
And I will tell you you need to prepare for the day when things go badly wrong.
Couldn’t happen, I hear you say. You have always been virtuous in every aspect of your life and will bring that purity into your political life.
Now, if you tell me this, I will tell you two things. One, you’re a sanctimonious pain in the ass, and your chances of getting elected are small because most people would infinitely rather elect a wide boy than a saint. Sainthood isn’t that relatable.
Two, you’re in denial. Of course you have made mistakes. Or will make mistakes. Or have even — whisper it low — done something that was worse than a mistake, that maybe had a little malice aforethought built into it. So let’s not be jejune about it. Do not kid yourself. Apply the following nine rules in the event of disaster.
Here’s why. Mainstream media commentators trawl. They spend their lives trawling. One journalist recently told me she can trace the source or spark behind most comment pieces, and she may be right. No matter how little-known the source, assume someone will pick up the story.
People in disaster situations do this all the time. It’s a pivotal error, predicated on the perception that speed is of the essence. Politicians say sorry for X and then, over the following week or (worse) fortnight, have Y and Z dragged out of them. Concentration on content rather than speed should dictate that, in this situation, your statement, when eventually issued, says: “I did X and I’m sorry, but you also need to know I did Y and Z, and I shouldn’t have done any of the three.” Full confession is painful, but infinitely less painful than journalistic surgery. That’s because investigative hacks tend to skip the anaesthesia bit.
Time and again, politicians pivot on a self-impalement accusation, surrounded by colleagues, civil servants, lawyers, and others, gathered around a computer screen, doing more debates than happen in the Oxford Union over one single word or phrase. They are busy about many things, but the visual is not among them. They do not think at all of how this will play out in moving, or still, pictures. So nobody thinks to protect the politician as they make their way to their car after the verbal parsing, and, as a consequence, Godawful footage of an isolated hunted human runs on that night’s nine o’clock news and in the following morning’s papers.
If things have gotten so bad that resignation is your only option, say you’re sorry, thank the people who stood by you, and put a big fat full stop after that first paragraph. Don’t waste your time making vague attacks on media and what false narrative you believe they peddled. Media may indeed have erred in their management of your tragedy, but now is not the time to do a corrective tutorial. Remember: you’re not on the high moral ground right now.
You had plenty of time you could have spent with them before now, so don’t go letting on they’re suddenly vitally important to you. The fact that this assertion has half a century, at least, of appearances in departure statements just shows that panicked people tend to say the same sad nonsense.
The reader/listener/voter will decide what’s a distraction and what’s not. You trying to make a virtue out of necessity may comfort you, but it won’t carry public weight. Think about it. If you mean you don’t want to distract members of the Government from doing their jobs, you overestimate your importance and underestimate their capacity for hard work under pressure.
In his resignation statement, the unfortunate Robert Troy objected to landlords being demonised. In factual terms, this is hairy, because landlords, in the weeks up to Robert’s departure, received exceptionally nuanced coverage because so many of them had been found to be leaving the property market. But even if they were being demonised, that neither caused nor mitigated his problems. Mentioning it in the departure statement, on the other hand, gave commentators more to talk about and less time to spend on the unstinting generous praise laid upon him by the Tánaiste and Taoiseach. A pointless lose/lose. It was an understandable consequence of his misery, but pointless nonetheless. Oh, and a related caveat — don’t attack media. What good is it going to do you? The people — and they are many — who hate media will be gratified, but so what? The fairest of commentators may acknowledge some media were less than professional in their coverage of your misfortunes, but here’s the unpalatable truth — they didn’t cause it.
You saw that last comment about you comforting yourself? It’s an inevitable human instinct. In bad times, we hope others will put a warm hand on our back or stand in front of us or stand shoulder to shoulder with us (“I am Spartacus”). We desperately need comforting when things go wrong. Especially if people don’t stand by us publicly. Bluntly, though, this is the time when you most need a harsh, realistic advisor who stops the leakage into your resignation document of any self-pity and helps you grasp the paradox: The less you pity yourself, the more other people pity you.
You made yourself interesting, and the awfulness of your situation is not going to persuade media, social, or mainstream, to back off. Give the facts, keep apologising, and work on the next phase of your career. Because voters, and the rest of the populace, love a redemption story.
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